Category: Archaeology

We all hate Nazis, agreed? (If not, stop reading here). When I was a small boy, the ‘Germans’ were the baddies in our games, on TV shows and those stalwart WW2 films. Only when I began to study history properly did I understand the difference between the Germans as a people and Fascism as a creed. You could indeed have ‘Good Germans’, even in a WW2 context. In films such as Cross of Iron and Stalingrad, and the TV series ‘Das Boot’ and ‘Our Mothers, Our Fathers’ we see the war from the German side. We empathise with characters doomed to fight a losing war they no longer believe in, but we never empathise with the Nazis. Even when we are rooting for the German squad or submarine crew we see the shadow of the ‘hardened Nazi’, the Gestapo and the SS falling over the characters’ lives. The ‘Good Germans’ become victims too. There is plenty of room for ambiguity – are we really hoping that Oberst Steiner will kill Churchill in Jack Higgins The Eagle Has Landed?

A panel at the entertaining ‘Morecambe and Vice’ festival last weekend chaired by Guy Fraser-Sampson comprised Howard Linskey, Chris Petit and Luke McCallin. All have set novels in the context of Nazi Germany. The question was posed as how a detective story can be written against a background of escalating horror and atrocity that marked the Second World War. When millions are being systematically murdered, when people can be arrested, tortured and killed without recourse to legal process, who cares about a single body in the library or the theft of some countess’ emeralds? It is the job of the author to make us care.

The Nazis were intensely bureaucratic and whilst their leadership behaved like gangsters, pillaging Europe’s riches for their own enrichment, the lower tiers busied themselves with solving humdrum traffic offences, fraud, theft and ‘ordinary’ murder. The Germans had tiers of police and security services – not just civilian police, but also the Abwehr, Kripo, Gestapo, the SD, Sipo and so on making ripe territory for intrigue and setting tripwires in the path of any investigation.

Contrary to popular belief the Germans did not have a well-oiled efficient war machine. Nazis of all levels were spurred on by personal ambition, jealousy and fear as much as doctrine. Hitler encouraged jockeying for position between his officers. Inter-service and inter-departmental rivalry was poisonous, and putting a foot wrong could ultimately be fatal. McCallin’s Abwehr officer Reinhardt has to negotiate this political minefield to solve the murder of a high-profile woman in occupied Sarajevo. He remains the ‘Good German’ whilst others around him participate in war crimes with enthusiasm or at least allow themselves to be dragged along by the tide of history. ‘Only following orders’ many tens of thousands adopted a ‘grey morality’ simply to survive.

‘Great’ historical personalities such as Caesar, Alexander and Napoleon committed brutal acts that today we would call war crimes but the distance of time has dimmed the shock. All the world’s major nations’ histories hold atrocities to be ashamed of and there are a fair few men such as Ghengis Khan with the blood of millions on their hands, yet the Nazis hold a special place as the villains par excellence. Perhaps it is because their atrocities were so recent, perhaps because they were more visible than those of Stalin, or closer to home than those of Pol Pot. My Channel Island home fell under their darkness, and the rest of Britain so nearly fell too. The ‘what if’ of Len Deighton’s SS-GB came close to being a reality. The Czechs faced this horror at the hands of Heydrich, the subject of Linskey’s Hunting the Hangman; he shows up the contradiction in many Nazis, as when home from being a ruthless liquidator of undesirables Heydrich apparently loved his family.

The Nazis have become the poster boys for evil chic; smart grey uniforms, skull badges, black leather coats, sinister swastikas and screaming eagles. Unnervingly this still lends them glamour, shown by the auction value of SS-daggers and the like. Their uniforms contrast with the dull greens and browns of the Allies, their ‘wonder weapons’ contested against utilitarian Allied machines. History porn TV documentaries and books endlessly probe into their mystique. Their influence extends routinely into Science Fiction, especially the barely disguised ‘First Order’ of Star Wars Episode VII with its Stormtroopers and gleefully ruthless commanders. ‘Neo Nazi’ groups still strut around, forgetting how decisively the fascist creed was crushed.

Nazis become the enemy of choice in movies as diverse as the Indiana Jones series, ‘Captain America’ comics, to The Blues Brothers. It is so easy to cast Nazis as the bad guys that we writers must not become lazy. Yes, we know they are bad, we get it. Yes, the iconography oozes evil. Now make us care about the characters opposing them, or oppressed by them, or forced to co-exist with them; we know how Nazism ultimately fell, but the characters don’t.

I felt as if I was in a scene from a Jeffrey Flint novel. An email came in saying a skull had been found in the island of Alderney, then a phone call from the police concerned they had a crime scene. It had turned up in a trench being dug for an electric main across the dunes of Longis Common. Was this a crime scene or an archaeological site? Which aspect of ‘blood and trowels’ was involved?

From the start I was pretty sure the skull was ancient – there were reports of Roman burials in that area dating back to Victorian times. However, sensationalist stories swirl about Alderney and inevitably some people started to wonder if this was a slave worker murdered or worked to death by the Nazis during their occupation of the island. The fact that the skull came from under the road, and the road was laid round about the war, suggested to me that this was most likely to be pre-war. The depth of 1.2 metres was also about right. There is I believe a whole Iron Age and Roman landscape buried under 1-2 metres of sand at Longis, possibly a whole village or fort. Only a hundred metres or so from the finds stands the best preserved late Roman small fort in Britain – the Nunnery.

I couldn’t fly to Alderney as notice was too short to get a flight, but my local colleague Isabel was able to examine the bones and the site. The police decided this was not a crime scene and we archaeologists were in business. I was able to bring the bones back with me latter than week in an ‘evidence’ bag. Then came a call that more skulls had been found. It was 8.30pm and I was settling down for a movie. There was still free seats on the Friday morning flight, so I was in the island by 9am next day. Unlike the UK, little Alderney has no resident professional rescue archaeology unit to call on but the all-volunteer Alderney Society were on hand to lend assistance.

It was summer-holiday brochure hot and I always love working in Alderney. The site overlooks wide Longis Bay with France 9 miles in the distance. Workmen soon showed me the lengths of wall – presumed Roman – emerging from the 300m long trench. We walked the trench and spotted something sticking out of the side. It was an Iron Age pot that had been clipped by the excavator scoop. I could easily dig it out of the sand with my hands, scooping fragments of pot, charcoal and burned bones into bags to be ‘excavated’ later.

My colleague Isabel and I then tackled the second skull, which was jutting into the trench just over a metre down, within a stone-lined cist whose lid had been partly torn off by the excavator. The skull had also been damaged (and was still protected by ‘Police Do Not Cross’ tape) but I set to, again mostly with fingers. I had only once dug up a skeleton and that was in 1980. Then I had used a teaspoon to gently remove a Merovingian woman’s bones from a wet sticky ditch, using a paperclip to clean her teeth.

In the case of Alderney it was fingers, and we had a race against time as the project needed to push forward and the all-sand sections don’t stay in place very long. I believe Skull 2 to have belonged to a woman, and she (?) was buried with her chin on her chest, looking at her feet. Maybe she had been lowered in a shroud to give her that hunched posture. Her face was almost intact and I found the lower mandible as well as some vertebra. The ribs were well under the road so I left those in place.

And then we found a third body, a few metres further down the trench. This was a small skeleton- possibly a juvenile, Skull 1 had also looked like a juvenile and I’m wondering whether it once belonged to this body as I only saw legs and a pelvis. A full skeleton was a different matter to retrieving damaged skulls. We’d also walked the trench with Rick from the engineering team and found half a dozen other likely spots. It was time to halt the commando raid, take stock, and call for reinforcements.

Yes its excavating season. Time to bring out the digging t-shirts, cowboy hat and trusty 4.5″ pointing trowel.

This August we returned to the Nunnery in Alderney, where our team last dug in 2013. This is Britain’s best preserved Roman small fort, continuing in use as medieval castle, Napoleonic barracks, German strongpoint, farm, hospital and holiday home. At some point in history it may even have been a nunnery, but we don’t know when.

We enjoyed 9 days of solid Alderney sunshine, only braving the rain to backfill on the last day. Nothing quite matches the experience of being on a dig with a dozen close friends. It is an intense and mindful experience. As director I thought of little else for two weeks other than the next layer we had to remove, the photographs needing taking, the record to complete. Our diggers needed to be fed at regular intervals too.

I actually ‘dug’ very little. In truth I scraped away at a few points to confirm the relationship between layers and I emptied the grand total of three buckets. Surveying, recording and photography occupied much of the time. Although we were looking for the gateway of the Roman tower (and found it!) most of the objects we found were post-medieval as the site has been re-occupied, rebuilt and generally messed around with for 1700 years. The pic on the right has me with a surveying pole at the bottom of a pit which had been full of WW2-era rubbish, standing between a German faux bastion and a post-medieval building 6ft below the surface. Right behind me is the inner face of the Roman fort wall, revealed down to its base for the first time.

Anyone interested in what we found should check out the ‘Alderney Nunnery’ Facebook page.

The site is in a glorious location, right on the sweeping beach of Longis Bay. We managed four swims after work when the tide was coming up not quite to lap the feet of the Nunnery’s fallen east wall. Afterwards, the evenings saw us enjoy Alderney hospitality at its best by sampling a different pub or restaurant each night. I put on more weight thanks to the food and wine than I lost perspiring on site! All good things must end and I’m back in the garret in Guernsey now, sweltering in the heat even though it is past nine o’clock. I have a great pile of finds record sheets, context record sheets, levels, photographs and two hours of video to work through before writing the dig up for publication. In many ways, my work has only just begun.

“Don’t judge a book by its cover” is a widely ignored cliché, as many book buyers do just that. In general the advice is (1) ensure the book looks like the kind of book it is supposed to be and (2) in the modern age make sure it works as a website thumbnail.

My publishers have over the years have for the most part consulted me on my covers, even if it was an ‘does this have your approval’ on a final choice. My first York pottery book was a heap of fun. We’d found several hundred pieces of unused glossy orange samian ware in a pile on the site, so I suggested we simply photograph a heap of pots.

I had three suggestions for the cover of Glint of Light on Broken Glass. The cover designer at Matador seized on one – an abandoned pair of spectacles on a beach. A stock photograph was found that adapted nicely as a cover, with a great use of fonts. But there was one problem; the glasses were clearly modern – 1960’s at the earliest. The glasses in question tumbled from George’s face in 1906 so would have been of the round, Edwardian style with wire frames.

It so happened that the Museum had a pair of replica Edwardian glasses in its ‘handling collection’ (objects that schoolchildren can touch without fear the object will be broken or lost forever). I was due to attend an overnight Archaeologists’ Christmas Party on Lihou Island, so took the glasses along.

It was mid afternoon, chilly, with the sun dodging in and out of cloud. I took 40 photographs of the glasses whilst there was still daylight. Guernsey sand is very yellow, so the gold-rimmed frames simply vanished against it. I left the beach and started to climb amongst the rocks. I photographed them sitting on rocks, trapped between rocks, lying in rock-pools, lying in little streamlets with water flowing over them.

When the sun came out, the water sparkled and so did the lenses. With some fiddling I could catch the bright clouds in one lens – the Glint in the Eye that George notices. No need for photoshopping or clever composure. Lihou’s rocks offered a variety of textures and colours, limpets and weed, shallow puddles, wet and dry patches.

After an hour I had enough shots – the sun was falling and it was time to return to the party. I sent a shortlisted selection to the designer and the final choice was to desaturate the colours. The image chosen has the glasses upside-down with the arms conspiring to form a heart. On cue the sun is reflecting in the right lens. Perfect.

For the first half of my career, I was an ‘artefact researcher’. It is natural therefore that my archaeological thrillers contain plenty of objects. Objects can be dated, as can particular social habits and organisations, so we can quickly spot a piece of period fiction without being told it was set in the past. Fairly soon afterwards we start homing in on the date. A single fact the hero carries a revolver provides a terminus post quem, as archaeologists say – the date after which the story must be set. The clattering of his secretary’s typewriter provides a terminus ante quem – less reliably a date before the novel is likely to be set. The association of the two suggests middle-twentieth century.

I read Peter Robinson’s Caedmon’s Song recently and within a few pages got the uncanny feeling it was set in the past. Checking the publication date of 1990 provided the answer – it was simply a 26-year old book. The author even discusses this in his afternote to the paperback edition. ‘Contemporary’ novels do not remain contemporary for very long. Charles Dickens and Jane Austen were once contemporary novelists

My first novel Darkness Rises was set nominally in 1989, the year of the Green Party revival, although my agent advised me to omit specific contemporary events to prevent the book dating. I wrote it during 1992, inspired by my own experiences in the late eighties. So, my hero Jeffrey Flint uses a fax machine for the first time. His sidekick Tyrone is experimenting with computer databases, but Flint is far from convinced. My old hippie hero does not drive, has no phone at home and when there is a stake-out later in the book, has to borrow some walkie-talkies (which fail to work). My archaeologists use the (then) cutting-edge techniques of pollen analysis, land-snail counting and DNA fingerprinting. A lead suspect has not heard of any of these new techniques “They sound tedious,” he sneers.

By Byron’s Shadow, the ‘present’ has advanced to the mid-nineties, with flashbacks to the early eighties. Vikki the reporter now has a mobile phone, which Flint deplores. When faking documents, he has to use mapping pens and Letraset (remember Letraset?). The plot hinges around an archaeological survey, for which I intended to employ a device called a resistivity meter. This was becoming old hat by draft 2, as my own excavation unit in York had begun early experiments with ground-piercing radar. This then became the novel tool introduced by a helpful American academic: the radar was on a sledge, linked to a bulky computer. As I wrote and re-wrote, this technology moved from being theoretical to practical. It is now standard – you can see it on Time Team most weeks, but the modern machine is man-portable with global positioning and the bulky computer is now a laptop, soon to become a tablet.

Flint has reluctantly bought a van by Shadesmoor. Tyrone now has a mobile phone and flaunts his new laptop computer. The old ‘dumpy’ surveying device has been replaced by the laser-guided EDM and inevitable computer link. The University has dumped its old typewriters so Flint learns to use a PC, but the fact that the University sells off redundant machines provides a major red herring. In a few years, people might ask “what’s a typewriter?”

Artefacts abound in Lady in the Lake, from ancient swords to a decommissioned bren gun and a decrepit Citroen 2CV. The book begins with our hero watching the movie Excalibur on video. How long now before VCR machines are extinct, and readers of my backlist are puzzled by the reference? The ‘new’ technology included video discs, which are already obsolete. Archaeology moved into the mainstream during the 1990’s, and the book reflects the new commercialisation with A/V presentations and press conferences. Academic conferences are still using slide projectors and overhead projector screens however, which Powerpoint has long since condemned to the spoil-heap of history. There is a foretaste of the wave of popular history programmes that started with Time Team and now infest satellite TV, but I did not foresee the incredible 3D graphic reconstructions of ancient sites and objects now possible.

With my fifth novel and a new millennium, Flint’s 1970’s value set was increasingly out of place, so the lead role was taken by Maddy Crowe, lady illustrator and ancient fashion expert. She lives with her mobile phone, lugs around a laptop with graphics package and drives a trendy small SUV. All this high-tech gear leads the writer into new territory. Whereas Flint had to hunt down his witnesses in person (sometimes on his pushbike) Maddy simply sends an email or dials them up on her mobile. Where Flint needed to conduct laborious research in libraries, Maddy can quickly trawl the internet. Her fake documents can be knocked up in a couple of minutes on a PC. If Flint had a mobile, or the internet, half the peril of his earlier adventures would have been dissipated in moments.

Almost everyone indeed has a mobile in When the Dust Settles. This invention could rob the thriller of peril. Being stalked? Ring the cops. Lost your sidekick in the fog? Ring his mobile. Trapped in the burning building? Same. The writer must bend over backwards to get rid of those plot-spoiling phones by convenient signal black-spots, dead batteries, sly thefts or diehard old hippies who refuse to own one. Moving on to today (2016), the police are incredibly sophisticated, pushing the lone cop cracking a murder into the realm of fantasy without a good deal of special pleading.

Maddy’s ‘hairdresser’s 4×4’ may become as sure a marker for the ‘noughties’ as the Mini was for the ‘sixties’. Her mobile phone is already outdated by iphones, bluetooth technology and Borg-like ear attachments. Even the hardware used so prominently by Lisbeth Salander in the recent Girl… series is already dated. Flint’s beard, uncannily, is back in fashion. Ultimately, perhaps we are all writing period fiction.

Recently I read a book by an academic colleague. It was interesting and ground-breaking but needed a good edit, and I told the author so. The author was surprised. The facts were right, a spell-checker had been used and there were no obtrusive typos. What the book lacked was that final polish which would expand its value beyond just a worthy addition to the library.

Academics are often writing for themselves, or for a small audience who they fear will stick the daggers in. A lot of non-fiction is likewise written for the author’s pleasure, with a hope there is a readership out there. This is particularly true of self-published or small press books. I frequently have conversations with aspiring non-fic writers who don’t see the value of a third party editor. Time and again I see a new book which dearly cried out for an edit – in some cases a ‘heavy edit’ which takes the author’s raw text and turns it into something engaging and readable. Hopefully, also error-free, as the rush into print is the biggest error of the first time author.

In my last post I discussed my approach to drafting – that’s the self-editing process where I produce a text to my own satisfaction. The facts are right (as far as I can establish), the grammar is right (to the limits of my education) and my style is firmly imprinted on the book.

“Remember thou art human”

So then its off to the agent/publisher’s editor in the case of my fiction. My most gruelling edits were however the two Roman York volumes. I received back the whole text printed out on wide ‘tractor’ paper. Down the margins were individual comments and questions by the Director, the Deputy Director, the Head of Finds, the Head of Pottery, the Chief Editor and indeed the Editor. Sigh. Archaeologists are nothing if not thorough. Even my small ‘Story of Guernsey’ history book was sent to eight colleagues to verify and comment on. These comments need to be taken on the chin –

“If I know what I am writing is rubbish, then so will the person who reads it”

As my chemistry teacher used to say. If an editor thinks your sentences are too long, or you are mis-using subordinate clauses, then so will many of the people reading it. My big sin my latest editor tells me is that I over-use hyphens. Take the hits, make the changes, and a better book results.

It was a divers’ joke. The object they found was a blue-grey colour, heavy, metallic. It was the size of a man’s oustretched palm, with a circular central hole and three vanes each with a screw hole. Three further supporting lugs added strength. They called it the Fiat Gearbox, or the Messerschmitt gearbox, thinking this might be a relic from the Occupation rather than a piece of the Roman ship. There was a fair amount of modern junk which had collected in the scour pits formed by Asterix, including a ‘Sealink’ saucer, so it was not an unreasonable idea.

Then we found a second one, embedded deep in the pine tar. There is even video of a diver chipping it out. I had the job of cleaning this, painstakingly using a pin drill to cut away the clinging tar. It was clearly Roman – and far more ancient than Fiat!

A quick literature search showed that similar objects had been found on several Mediterranean wrecks of the Roman and Byzantine periods. Each was subtly different, but the general design was the same – a metal fixing with circular hole supported so it would attach to a wooden structure. The objects were bearings for a bilge pump. Finds from the sunken barges on Lake Nemi dating to the time of Nero offered the best indication of how these would work. A simple chain of cups was powered by a crank and served to scoop water overboard. The design had clearly been in use for at least three centuries by the time Asterix went down.

The presence of a bilge pump explained the ‘limber holes’ cut onto the undersurface of the floor timbers in Asterix. these would allow bilge water to flow freely along the hold of the ship. They only made sense if there was a pump – and this pump had to be located at the lowest part of the ship. Out two parts were however found up in the aft hold, too far back to be effective. Either the pump could be unshipped when not required and was stored at the back, or our two bearings were being carried as spares. One is on display at Castle Cornet and the second at Guernsey Museum. Cleaned and conserved, less burnt than the first, the second one has a dull bronze-brown colour.

The presence of this ‘Roman’ invention on an otherwise ‘Celtic’ style ship further shows how ‘Asterix’ employed the best technology each culture could offer.

For the past few months I’ve been editing a book written by a colleague. Wrecked, Guernsey Shipwrecks, is the work of Patrick Martin. When Patrick was working at Fort Grey Shipwreck Museum he asked if he could write a book about the wrecks on display. This seemed an ideal opportunity to publish some of the large collection of photographs and other images in the Museum collection.

The book takes a look at some unusual wrecks, as well as those familiar from displays in Guernsey’s Shipwreck and Maritime Museums.

Wrecked is on sale from 9 December from the Museum shop, other boookshops and online from Guernsey Museum Shop

Back in 1985, the divers departed leaving me with occasional volunteers to record the timbers. Some had been planned in position on the seabed, which was fortunate in the case of one keel timber – the largest on the ship- which vanished overnight and was never seen again. We think it was dragged out into the Russell by prop-wash.

After basic cleaning, the recording could begin. The storage tanks were drained overnight once a week, then refilled the following day, which took about 3 hours. After spraying them to keep wet, I’d step into the tank and start work. At lunchtime I’d set the fill hosepipe going, which would still allow an hour or two’s work before the water reached welly-top height and forced me to stop.

A polythene sheet was laid over the timber and I traced it with marker pens, producing drawings up to 5 metres long, with the nail holes, tool marks and damage marked in different colours. The sheets were hung up to dry, giving the place the look of a laundry. Once dry, I laid the sheets out on a table marked with two-centimeter grids. I then copied the drawing onto scaled ‘permatrace’ sheets at a scale of 1:10. As a cross-check, I next surveyed the timbers conventionally using tape measures and plumb lines and used this to correct the tracing. Margaret and I then started juggling the pieces together by matching up the nail holes, planking to floor timbers.

Zoom to 2015 and we have a new jigsaw puzzle to solve. My colleague Kit is retracing my steps, checking each timber against the original drawings. Some were cut for transportation, others broke, most had to have their tags removed during the conservation process. The Old Post Office looks rather like one of those hangars used after an air crash, with parts of ship spread on sheets. We’re painstakingly working out which timber is which, and where the many small fragments fit.